Subtitles of the Movie

Let's talk a little bit about how these tutorials are organized so you can make the most out of your experience watching them. There are three tutorials, a beginner, an intermediate, and an advanced. There will be one solution created through the three-part series. We'll start off with the Contact Manager and then will change and expand into an invoicing solution. So we'll use one example all the way through because this helps you to understand the whole process of creating a solution. Rather than a bunch of random techniques that you have to figure out how to implement yourself, we're going to actually create a solution through the three-part series. Now, the tutorials can be used separately if you want. In fact, you can look at a single chapter if you want. That's because, in the Work Files section, we've provided the actual files that I'm creating in the tutorial, so you can go ahead and find the file that is at the beginning of the chapter and one that's at the end of the chapter, depending on what you want, and that way what you can do it start off where that chapter begins, have the example file there so you can review a chapter, if you want. I would recommend definitely watching the Beginner tutorial, even if you're an intermediate user. The reason is you can always learn something. There's always a nugget or several nuggets that you can get out of something, but it's also important because the Beginner tutorial sets up the intermediate and advanced. Because of that one solution, just watching the intermediate, even if you watch it quickly through, is going to really make you understand where we're coming from. So again, you can watch the chapters separately, since the Work Files are included. Don't forget about those Work Files. They're very important and there's lots of additional things provided, such as graphics and things like that in the work files that will help you do a much better job at following these tutorials. Let's talk about the Beginner tutorial. What we're going to do is create a fully functional contacts solution, starting from the very beginning. That means we're going to go up to the File menu, choose New, create all the fields, all the tables, everything that goes into it, and make a basic contacts solution. We're going to cover things such as data entry. We'll cover how to create fields, how to name them, naming conventions and things like that, the different types of fields, date fields, time stamps, container fields, all that kind of good stuff. We'll create tables. We'll design layouts, everything that goes along with the design layouts. We'll talk about the four modes. You have Browse Mode, Find mode, Layout Mode, Preview Mode. We'll talk about all the menus so you'll know everything that's under all the menus. We'll create value lists so you can create pop-up menus. We'll talk about auto enter, validation, container fields so you can put pictures and PDF documents right inside of FileMaker. We'll talk to you about how to create a printing layout because you usually don't want to have a data entry layout act as a print layout. We'll talk about importing data and exporting data. We'll use templates to start your job off so you can get started quickly. We'll do a little bit of scripting. We'll cover reporting, which is usually the reason people decide to create a database, they want to do reporting, and of course we'll do calculations. So the Beginner tutorial was designed for somebody who has never used FileMaker before. It does start slow and then increases in difficulty throughout the tutorial. It will definitely get you up to an intermediate level, but I also teach on a staircase. I want to make sure that there's a little bit of everything. There's mostly beginner, but there's a little bit of intermediate mixed in there and maybe even some advanced hidden features that aren't that difficult to understand, so even intermediate people will find stuff that they wanted to know. If you skip the beginner module, then you'll be in trouble, I think. The Intermediate tutorial continues on with the solution and it expands it from a contacts solution to an invoicing solution, so the contacts become customers and they get used in the entire invoicing solution. We'll have products and invoices and all that kind of good stuff, so this will be the intermediate level. So we'll start into interface design. Very important. We'll do stuff that you can't do with the normal graphic tools. We'll talk about relationships, one to many, many to ones, one to ones, and many to many relationships, along with join tables. We'll discuss table occurrences. What are they for? How can you use them? We'll talk about security. Very important. We want to make sure you understand accounts and privilege sets and extended privileges. We'll also talk about record locking, which is very important in a multi-user scenario. I bet if I asked everybody who is watching this tutorial to raise their hands, 99 percent of them would say they're working in a multi-user scenario, so you need to know about record locking. Custom functions are great and we'll even do recursive custom functions. We'll talk about scripts, like finding overdue invoices. That's a really neat script. We'll work with the script debugger to find a problem with the script. We'll use the database design report. We'll work with plug-ins. We'll write a script to delete duplicates and use other methods. There will be quite a few. And my favorite will be working on dynamic scripting; in other words, making scripts that adapt to the scenario. And we'll also be doing lots of advanced validations and much more stuff, too much to cover here.